Current Directions in Behavioral Science

Probing Pooch Paw Preferences

2012-02-29T05:51:00.000-08:00

Dogs were used to elaborate two instrumental reactions flexing the left or right forepaw respectively to pull a dish of food within reach of its mouth. If both paws were simultaneously fixed to levers, dog was faced with a choice between two reactions. In preliminary trials right paw preference was strong despite equal effectiveness of the left paw in obtaining the food. The aim of the experiment was to alter this right paw preference by forcing the use of the left paw. more

Unusual Flavors Can Dampen Immune Response

2012-02-28T05:35:00.000-08:00

Beware of the Dogs

2012-02-27T05:35:00.002-08:00

A good dog is a natural super soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet obedient. It can leap higher than most men and run twice as fast. Its eyes are equipped for night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the most fractious prey. But its true glory is its nose. In the nineteen-seventies, researchers found that dogs could detect even a few particles per million of a substance; in the nineties, more subtle instruments lowered the threshold to particles per billion; the most recent tests have brought it down to particles per trillion. “It’s a little disheartening, really,” said Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist at the Canine Detection Research Institute, at Auburn University. “I spent a good six years of my life chasing this idea, only to find that it was all about the limitations of my equipment.” Just as astonishing, to Waggoner, is a dog’s acuity—the way it can isolate and identify compounds within a scent, like the spices in a soup. more

Treating Fear, Anxiety, and PTSD

2012-02-24T05:40:00.000-08:00

[S]omeone who's afraid of dogs can often be helped by treatment where they're given limited exposure to dogs, showing them that dogs really aren't so frightening after all. Psychologists call this fear extinction therapy...In the study, adult mice were trained to fear a tone by repeatedly giving them a foot shock right after the tone was produced. After two weeks of this, some of the mice were given fear extinction therapy -- repeated exposure to the tone without an accompanying foot shock, while others were not. And half of the mice had their drinking water replaced by a Prozac solution...The mice were then tested at various time periods to see how the behavioral therapy and the drug therapy, alone and in combination, affected their fear of the tone, by looking at whether or not the mice froze when they heard the tone. more

Hazing Coyotes?

2012-02-23T05:57:00.000-08:00

Aversion conditioning, or hazing, is the keystone to many successful coyote management plans. But what exactly is hazing? "Hazing is a non-lethal wildlife management tool that attempts to teach wildlife that humans are dangerous," explained Dr. Camilla Fox, Executive Director of Project Coyote...Hazing has proven successful in many communities because of what it addresses: unintentional positive reinforcement of behaviour. more

New Brain Connections Form in Clusters During Learning

2012-02-22T05:35:00.000-08:00

New connections between brain cells emerge in clusters in the brain as animals learn to perform a new task, according to a study published in Nature...The researchers studied mice as they learned new behaviors, such as reaching through a slot to get a seed. They observed changes in the motor cortex, the brain layer that controls muscle movements, during the learning process. Specifically, they followed the growth of new "dendritic spines," structures that form the connections (synapses) between nerve cells. more

Babies "Catch Words" Early?

2012-02-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

In the study, 33 infants ages 6 to 9 months and 50 kids ages 10 to 20 months sat on their mothers’ laps in front of a computer connected to an eye-tracking device. Even at 6 months, babies looked substantially longer, on average, at images of various foods and body parts named by their mothers when those items appeared with other objects. Kids as young as 6 months, for example, looked longer at a picture of hair paired with a picture of a banana when their mothers said “Look at the hair,” relative to time spent looking at a hair image when their mothers said “Look at the banana.” Infants also homed in on the nose on a woman’s face after their mothers said “Do you see the nose?” more

Twitter Study Looks for Most Effective Ways to Share Info

2012-02-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

[R]esearchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Georgia Institute of Technology recently published a study designed to understand the different reactions spurred by Twitter updates...André said that the question that ignited this research was the following: There are many mechanisms of positive reinforcement, such as favoring tweets, “like” buttons on Facebook, or “+1” on Google, but what would a “dislike” button tell us? There is an accepted practice of online social interaction, as Carnegie Mellon computer science Ph.D. student Rob Simmons confirmed, but the norms are not clear to everyone. more

Latest Issue of Behavior Modification Now Available

2012-02-15T06:08:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of the journal Behavior Modification is now available online. Behavior Modification (BMO) presents insightful research, reports, and reviews on applied behavior modification. Each issue offers successful assessment and modification techniques applicable to problems in psychiatric, clinical, educational, and rehabilitative settings, as well as treatment manuals and program descriptions. Practical features help you follow the process of clinical psychological research and to apply it to behavior modification interventions.

Latest Issue of Behavioral Interventions Now Available

2012-02-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of the journal Behavioral Interventions is now available. Behavioral Interventions aims to report research and practice involving the utilization of behavioral techniques in the treatment, education, assessment and training of students, clients or patients, as well as training techniques used with staff. Behavioral Interventions publishes: (1) research articles, (2) brief reports (a short report of an innovative technique or intervention that may be less rigorous than a research report), (3) topical literature reviews and discussion articles, (4) book reviews.

Why We Like What We Like

2012-02-14T05:33:00.000-08:00

We can discriminate dog food and paté, red wine and white, holding hands with someone we love and holding hands with a stranger. But what we are discriminating, when we do this, is not neural events in the mouth or hand, but what we are doing. And when the wine expert, or the lover, describes what matters in the flavor, or the caress, he or she is not identifying marks or features of the intrinsic qualities in the nervous system that only the expert of the lover can discern; taste is not a kind of measurement. Rather, the expert is calling attention to features of the flavor and the action that are precisely there for us to think about and pay attention to. more

Behaviour Game Produces Positive Classroom Results

2012-02-13T05:47:00.000-08:00

A game for young students being played in Winnipeg schools is reducing disruptive behaviour, and it may go a long way in preventing mental illness later in life, CBC's Nahlah Ayed reports. The game, which mixes competion and positive reinforcement, is meant to help students develop self-control. Teachers say they've seen big changes since the game was introduced to schools in a pilot project in September. more

A From a Book about the Future to the Neural Underpinnings of the Past

2012-02-10T05:36:00.000-08:00

Hebb’s work has since been expanded on, refined, and modified, but the general principle remains the same: training matters when it comes to how we learn and what we remember. Habit is king. Hebb’s postulate explains much of the logic behind such phenomena as Pavlovian conditioning (bell plus food equals salivation; fast forward to bell alone equals salivation), Skinnerian conditioning (pull lever, get pellet, learn to pull lever for pellet), fear conditioning and desensitization (think James Watson and poor Little Albert, or James Ledoux and scary snakes), and visual learning (Hubel and Wiesel and monocular deprivation in cats—no visual stimulus during the critical period makes for blind felines). Of course, it’s far more complicated than a single postulate, but the basic process is all about how our brains are trained, by our external and internal environment both, to respond to various situations in a predictable fashion. more

Latest Issue of Inside Behavior Analysis Newsletter Now Available

2012-02-10T05:35:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of Inside Behavior Analysis is now available online from the Association for Behavior Analysis, International (ABAI). The Association publishes three newsletters annually to inform ABAI members of news and events. Newsletter editions typically feature updates from the ABAI leadership, a focused topic of interest to the membership, upcoming events, and updates from chapters, SIGs, and other behavioral organizations.

A Mobile Device to Prevent and Treat Drug Use?

2012-02-09T05:35:00.000-08:00

Imagine a device combining sensors to measure physiological changes. Then imagine a smartphone with software applications designed to respond to your bodily changes in an attempt to change your behavior. That is the vision behind "iHeal," currently being developed by Edward Boyer from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the US, and his colleagues. The multimedia device is an innovative combination of 'enabling technologies' which can detect developing drug cravings and intervene as the cravings develop to prevent drug use...When the software detects an increased stress or arousal level, it asks the user to annotate events by inputting information about their perceived level of stress, drug cravings, and current activities. iHeal's ultimate goal is to identify, in real-time, drug cravings and deliver personalized, multimedia drug prevention interventions precisely at the moment of greatest need. more

When Life is a Bunch of Carrots

2012-02-08T06:02:00.000-08:00

When the government offers tax deductions for charitable donations, when a soup kitchen feeds the homeless on the condition that they attend church, or when the writer of a will attaches stipulations to a bequest — all these situations involve incentives. Dr. Ruth W. Grant, a political science and philosophy professor and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, says we tend to view such incentives as some form of voluntary trade. In fact, she says, they often indicate an imbalance of power, and thus raise ethical issues. more

School-Wide Token Economy Encourages Good Beahvior, Discourages Bad

2012-02-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

"We try to have more positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement," Auld explains, "so when students are caught in the act of being positive, like encouraging a friend outside or picking up garbage, we recognize them on the spot." This recognition is received through slips of paper called 'gotchas.' Gotchas had originally been handed to students privately, but when Auld became principal four years ago she wanted these acknowledgements to be more public so she created the 'Celebrate Us' assemblies...There is also a negative component to the effective behaviour system to hinder bullying at the school. Opposite to gotchas, 'remembrance slips' are given to students who are seen misbehaving. School staff collects these slips and if a student accumulates three, a detention or other stricter punishment is given. more

Making Sense of Sensory Connections: Researchers Identify Mechanism Behind "Associative Memory"

2012-02-06T05:35:00.000-08:00

When a person encounters a favorite food or the perfume of a loved one, she will typically experience a recall, usually positive, based on the memories evoked by those smells. Such a recall -- to a smell, sound, taste, or any other sensory stimulus -- is evidence of "associative" learning, says Gilles Laurent, a former professor of biology at Caltech and senior author of the study, as learning often means assigning a value, such as beneficial or not, to inputs that were until then neutral. The original, neutral stimulus acquires significance as a result of being paired, or associated, with a reinforcing reward or punishment -- in this case, the pleasant emotion recalled by a smell. "When we learn that a particular sensory stimulus predicts a reward, there is general agreement that this knowledge is stored by changing the connections between particular neurons," explains Cassenaer. more

Science Decodes "Internal Voices"

2012-02-03T05:36:00.000-08:00

Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains. Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words that patients were thinking of. The method may in future help comatose and locked-in patients communicate. more

The Latest Issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Now Available

2012-02-03T05:35:00.001-08:00

The latest issue of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior is now available. The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior is a psychology journal primarily for the original publication of experiments relevant to the behavior of individual organisms.

The Latest Issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis Now Available

2012-02-03T05:35:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is now available. The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is a psychology journal that publishes research about applications of the experimental analysis of behavior to problems of social importance.

Insurers Use Rewards To Make Customers Safer, Cheaper

2012-02-02T05:35:00.000-08:00

Just as credit card companies offer rewards points to encourage more shopping, insurers offer incentives to foster safer habits — for your benefit and theirs. Call it positive reinforcement via positive reimbursement. UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Progressive (PGR) and Allstate (ALL) are among the companies offering incentives in exchange for certain types of actions and behavior...The idea is that safer or healthier people cost less money, and insurers are choosing to reward good behavior rather than punish bad behavior. more

Latest Issue of "The Current Repertoire" Now Available Online

2012-02-01T05:49:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of The Current Repertoire (Vol 28, #1, Winter 2012) is now available at the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies website. The Current Repertoire is the newsletter of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies and is published 3 times per year.

Colour Has an Influence on the Sense of Smell

2012-02-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

...I wasn't at all surprised to recently read a report on the book Neurogastronomy by Gordon Shepherd, who writes about a series of experiments which showed that "Colour has an influence on the sense of smell". Since physiologically what we call taste is in large part really a product of smell the reason you can't taste things when you have a cold if colour affects smell, then it also affects our perception of taste, something which, Gordon says, some psychologists regard as a kind of Pavlovian conditioning. more

UCF Anxiety Disorders Clinic Helps People Suffering from PTSD

2012-01-31T05:35:00.000-08:00

"Behavior therapy is the most studied and, what we call, empirically supported — meaning it has the most data behind it — treatment for anxiety disorders," [Dr. Deborah] Beidel said. "It's more effective than medication, and it's more effective than talk therapy."..This 17-week program takes place right under students' noses. Behind a door on the first floor of the Psychology building are offices that appear quite normal, until the X-box game controllers, scientist-like glasses and giant headphones are pulled out and hooked up...Beidel said that the core of behavioral therapy treatment is exposure. "Let's say you were afraid of a dog – how do you think you would get over that fear?" Beidel said. "You have to start being around dogs. We do it in a very controlled fashion, but exposure therapy arranges for you to get in touch with what it is that you're afraid of. We do it in a controlled environment – that's the key part." more

Positive Reinforcement May Help Patients Take Their Meds

2012-01-30T05:35:00.000-08:00

Positive reinforcement, such as receiving small, unexpected gifts and introducing upbeat thoughts into daily routines, seems to help patients with high blood pressure take their medication as directed, according to a new study of black Americans. The findings are significant because poor blood pressure control can lead to heart problems and death, the researchers from the Center for Healthful Behavior Change at NYU School of Medicine noted in the report published online Jan. 23 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. more

Addicted to Video Games?

2012-01-27T05:35:00.000-08:00

People in the gaming industry insist the games are meant to be fun, and nothing more. John Hopson, a former game researcher for Microsoft and current lead design researcher at Bungie, the company that created Halo 3, specializes in using behavioral psychology to design games with reward schedules to make sure players want to play forever, but doesn’t understand why people are so uncomfortable with that. “Furniture companies design chairs that fit a person’s body, and you don’t see anyone getting upset with that,’’ he said over the phone. “What’s the difference of a video game company designing a game to form to a person’s mind?’’ A lot, some addiction psychologists say. more

ABAI 2012 Annual Convention in Seattle: Program on the Web

2012-01-26T07:13:00.000-08:00

The program for the 2012 Association for Behavior Analysis, International Annual Convention in Seattle is now available on the web. Improvements to this year's online program include the ability to search by domain (applied research, basic research, service delivery, or theory); event number; keyword or key phrase; and author’s last name. The keyword/phrase and author’s last name include an exact match option, which can help you narrow results. more

When it Comes to Depression, Serotonin isn't the Whole Story

2012-01-25T05:35:00.000-08:00

"The problem with you," she explained, "is that you have a chemical imbalance. It's biological, just like diabetes, but it's in your brain. This chemical in your brain called serotonin is too, too low. There's not enough of it, and that's what's causing the chemical imbalance. We need to give you medication to correct that." Then she handed my mother a prescription for Prozac. That was the late '80s, but this story of a chemical imbalance brought on by low serotonin has remained very popular...[Dr. Joseph] Coyle, who is also the editor of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, says that though serotonin plays a role in depression, low serotonin is likely not the cause of depression. Scientific thinking has clearly shifted, he says. Still, the story of serotonin remains. Why does it continue to have such a powerful grip on the popular imagination? more

Psycholog Videos from The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies

2012-01-24T05:35:00.000-08:00

If you teach, consider adding the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies videos to your course material. Your students may purchase courses individually or you may purchase the courses and use them in your classes. If purchased individually, CCBS will provide certificates of completion so your students may turn in for credit. more

Can Online Gaming Influence a US Presidential Election?

2012-01-23T05:35:00.001-08:00

Political games have been around as long as politics. But advances in technology and social media could make them a huge factor in the upcoming US presidential election...[T]he scale and scope of the internet has made the implications of gamification much more important. "Now we have new tools," says Mr Corbett. "Before, you could maybe get someone to play a game across the city. Now you can get a million people over the course of a few days." There is also a new type of voter, raised on the fast pace of internet interactions. "They expect a more rewarding experience, and they expect a more immediate gratification," says Gamification's Gabriel Zichermann. "For them, it's about immediacy and feedback and reward and sociability. All of those things need to be present in a system in order to be interesting to this gamer generation." more

The Food Dudes: Boxing Clever in School Lunches

2012-01-23T05:35:00.000-08:00

The Food Dudes nationwide healthy food campaign for primary schools is run by Bord Bia and funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. Some 300,000 pupils (about 62 per cent of primary school children) have participated in the voluntary programme so far and 10 million portions of fruit and vegetables have been distributed in schools. Over a 16-day period, the children are shown DVDs of the Food Dudes, four characters who use superpowers they get from eating healthy foods to fight the Junk Punks. They are then given a small reward if they taste a portion of fruit and vegetables. The theory is that repeated tastings, peer modelling and a reward system will encourage children to eat healthily. more

Reinforcing Behavior in the Brain

2012-01-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

Harvard scientists have developed the fullest picture yet of how neurons in the brain interact to reinforce behaviors ranging from learning to drug use, a finding that might open the door to possible breakthroughs in the treatment of addiction. The finding is the result of a year-long effort by a team of researchers led by associate professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Naoshige Uchida to examine a brain process known as reward prediction error. Thought to be a key component of learning, prediction error was long believed to be the product of dopamine neurons firing in response to an unexpected "reward," thus reinforcing the behavior that led to the reward. But Uchida and colleagues from Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center report in the Jan. 18 issue of Nature that reward prediction error is actually the product of a complex interplay between two classes of neurons – one that relies on dopamine and an inhibitory class of neuron that uses the neurotransmitter GABA. more

Contracts in the Classroom?

2012-01-20T05:35:00.000-08:00

While contracts are an indispensable tool in the modern workplace, a new study has found that they may also be very effective in contemporary classrooms. According to a new article published in SAGE Open, courses in which students design their own course based on a contract lead to both higher grades and higher student satisfaction than traditional points-based courses. The article, "Use of Contract Grading to Improve Grades among College Freshmen in Introductory Psychology," details this study. Researchers Dana Lindemann and Colin Harbke assigned a total of 40 college freshmen enrolled in one introductory psychology course to a traditional or contract grading system. Those assigned to the contract system signed a contract at the beginning of the semester in which they indicated what grade they were aiming to receive and specified which assignments they would complete to receive that grade. Students who wanted to receive a better grade had to complete more assignments and receive a higher score on exams than those aiming for a lower grade. more

Terrence Sejnowski: Nature is More Clever Than We Are

2012-01-19T05:36:00.000-08:00

Buried deep in your midbrain there is a small collection of neurons, found in our earliest vertebrate ancestors, that project throughout the cortical mantle and basal ganglia that are important for decision making. These neurons release a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which has a powerful influence on our behavior. Dopamine has been called a "reward" molecule, but more important than reward itself is the ability of these neurons to predict reward: If I had that job, how happy would I be? Dopamine neurons, which are central to motivation, implement TD learning, just like VUMmx1...At the beginning of the cognitive revolution in the 1960s the brightest minds could not imagine that reinforcement learning could underlie intelligent behavior. Minds are not reliable. Nature is more clever than we are. more

Smartphone Users Imagine "Phantom Vibrations"

2012-01-19T05:35:00.000-08:00

We’ve all had that moment where we’ve imagined that our mobile phone has rung, or buzzed in our pockets, but when we pull it out to look there are no new calls or messages. Now a new study by Richard Balding of the University of Worcester has shown that we’re not alone, reports The Telegraph...The reasons why we struggle with a compulsion to check our phones or inboxes has been well understood for some time, even if not widely known...Dr Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. “Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’,” he says, “which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits..." more

What Is Classical Conditioning? (And Why Does It Matter?)

2012-01-18T05:35:00.000-08:00

From Scientific American: Classical conditioning is one of those introductory psychology terms that gets thrown around. Many people have a general idea that it is one of the most basic forms of associative learning, and people often know that Ivan Pavlov’s 1927 experiment with dogs has something to do with it, but that is often where it ends...The most important thing to remember is that classical conditioning involves automatic or reflexive responses, and not voluntary behavior (that’s operant conditioning, and that is a different post). What does this mean? For one thing, that means that the only responses that can be elicited out of a classical conditioning paradigm are ones that rely on responses that are naturally made by the animal (or human) that is being trained. more

Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us

2012-01-17T05:35:00.000-08:00

[The] assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism...The problem with this assumption, however, is that causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” more

Pavlovian Conditioning: One of Science's "Most Beautiful Theories"

2012-01-16T05:45:00.000-08:00

Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question...This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?"...Stephen Kosslyn, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, is most impressed by Pavlovian conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus such as a sound comes to be associated with a reward, such as food, producing a response, such as salivation. That much is familiar. Less well known is that Pavlovian conditioning might account for placebo effects. After people have used analgesics such as ibuprofen or aspirin many times, the drugs begin to have effects before their active ingredients kick in. more

Null-hypothesis Significance Testing: Benign or Malignant?

2012-01-16T05:44:00.000-08:00

In this podcast, R. Trent Codd, III, Ed.S. interviews Marc Branch, PhD about Null-hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST). Topics they discuss include: Common misunderstandings about NHST, What p really is, Side effects of NHST, Logical problems with NHST, Reasons NHST remains prevalent despite the many known problems, Alternatives to NHST. more

The Four Approaches to Game Making

2012-01-13T05:35:00.000-08:00

Rather than talking about games in terms of two lenses, I use four (potentially five, but I'll come back to that). Each represents a common set of assumptions and predispositions that I often see in makers, and there are correlations between them which makes for an interesting (though perhaps deceptively symmetric) diagram...Behaviorism is about considering the player as a collection of desires and creating systems that satisfy those desires. It is inspired by behavioral and motivational psychology, and considers all games as challenge, anticipation and reward engines. Behaviorists model their games on psychological hooks that open loops, draw engagement and encourage emotional attachment to outcomes. They use repetitive actions to complete those loops and deliver rewards. The anticipation of a loop's end, and the reward, has a powerful effect on the human mind and can engender feelings of optimism. In older forms that would mean money, such as a slot machine or a lottery. In newer forms it sometimes means points or virtual goods that the player will find useful toward another goal. more

Wines Brought to You in Smellyvision

2012-01-12T05:35:00.000-08:00

It happened to me recently: sitting in the icy gloom of Borough Market outside the Wine Pantry in south east London one night I ordered a glass of Camel Valley Pinot Brut Rosé 2009. It’s a wine I know well but I couldn’t see it and because it didn’t smell quite as redcurrant-and-raspberry as I remembered I actually queried whether I had been given the right fizz.I was quite glad to find backup for this experience in Gordon Shepherd’s fascinating new book, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavour and Why it Matters. “Colour has an influence on the sense of smell”, writes Shepherd. He reports that in an experiment at Brown University, subjects sniffing odourless solutions, some of which were coloured, some not, tended to assert that the coloured ones did have a smell. “Because coloured solutions like fruit juice usually have distinctive smells, seeing them stimulates the expectancy of the smell by itself. Some psychologists regard this as a kind of Pavlovian conditioning,” he explains. more

Smokers "Salivate" to Cigarettes: The Physiological Reactions to Associated Images

2012-01-11T05:35:00.002-08:00

It is commonly known that, much like Pavlov's dogs salivating in response to hearing the bell they associate with dinner time, smokers feel cravings and have physiological reactions to pictures they associate with smoking. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Neuroscience has shown that a smoker's cravings can also be trained to non-smoking related stimuli. Classical conditioning experiments link a neutral stimulus, such as a sound or a picture, to an event, like eating or smoking. Higher order, sometimes called second order conditioning, links this neutral stimulus to a second event...Marianne Littel and Prof Franken, from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, compared the reactions of smokers and non-smokers to a smoking related picture or to a neutral (non-smoking related) picture. These classical responses were then paired to a second round of neutral stimuli – the researchers chose a geometric shape (a cube or a pyramid). The responses of the subjects, such as their cravings and EEG measurements of brain activity, were recorded at each stage. more

Behavior Management to Reduce Substance Abuse, Crime and Re-Arrest for Drug-Involved Parolees

2012-01-11T05:35:00.001-08:00

Addiction treatment during the transition period can reduce relapse, but competing priorities such as the need for housing and finding work often limit ex-offenders willingness to participate in treatment. Parole and probation are supposed to encourage treatment and prevent a return drugs and crime, but they are poorly designed to do so. Probation and parole are based on supervision and punishment for bad behavior. For example, if a parolee tests positive for drugs, he/she might be returned to jail. Behavioral theory holds that effective reinforcers or punishments must be both immediate (close in time to the behavior) and reliable (happen every time the behavior happens). "Any parent knows that punishment alone is not the optimal way to motivate behavior – it is best to have both carrots and sticks," Friedmann says. "The problem is that punishment is neither immediate nor reliable -- in part because of due process, but also because surveillance is imperfect and offenders have a disincentive to get caught. Conversely, drug use produces both immediate and reliable reinforcement, where a user gets a good feeling with every use." more

Unusual Flavors Can Dampen Immune Response

2012-01-10T05:35:00.000-08:00

More than 100 years ago Ivan Pavlov famously observed that a dog salivated not only when fed but also on hearing a stimulus it associated with food. Since then, scientists have discovered many other seemingly autonomous processes that can be trained with sensory stimuli—including, most recently, our immune system. Researchers have long been able to train an animal’s immune system to respond to a nonpathogen stimulus. Pavlov’s students even did so in the early 20th century, but the famous dogs overshadowed their work. Then, in the 1970s, researchers trained rats and mice to associate a taste, such as sugar water, with an immunosuppressive drug. They found that after repeated conditioning, ingesting the sugar water alone could tamp down the animals’ immune response. more

Financial Incentive: iPhone App Charges Users for Skipping the Gym

2012-01-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer, class of 2010, have founded Gym-Pact.com, a service that charges users money for skipping planned visits to the gym. Zhang, who came up with the idea, was inspired by her study of behavioral economics, which taught her "that if you tie cash incentives to things that are concrete and easy to achieve like getting to the gym, it's very effective." "People don't like losing money and it's one of the strongest motivators, much more than winning money," Zhang told The New York Times. The minimum deduction for playing hooky from the health club is $5, charged to a credit card kept on file, but people can choose higher monetary stakes if they need greater incentives. more

Why You Don't Really Have Free Will

2012-01-06T05:46:00.000-08:00

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion...Many scientists and philosophers now accept that our actions and thoughts are indeed determined by physical laws, and in that sense we don't really choose freely, but philosophers have concocted ingenious rationalizations for why we nevertheless have free will of a sort. It's all based on redefining "free will" to mean something else. Some philosophers claim that if we can change our actions in response to reason, then we've shown free will. But of course the words and deeds of other people are simply environmental influences that can affect our brain molecules. more

CNN Video: Aubrey Daniels on Organizational Behavior Management

2012-01-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

Aubrey Daniels, founder and Chairman of Aubrey Daniels International (ADI), talks about organizational behavior management on CNN. From the ADI website:

Aubrey Daniels is the world’s foremost authority on applying the scientifically-proven laws of human behavior to the workplace. For more than 30 years, Aubrey and his esteemed colleagues have helped the world’s leading organizations employ the timeless principles of behavioral science to re-energize the workplace, optimize performance and achieve lasting results. Aubrey is the author of five best-selling books widely recognized as international management classics: Bringing out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement; Performance Management: Changing Behavior That Drives Organizational Effectiveness, Other People’s Habits, Measure of a Leader, and Oops! 13 Management Practices that Waste Time and Money (and what to do instead). His books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and French and have been licensed in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Romania and Saudi Arabia.

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In Classic vs. Modern Violins, Beauty Is in Ear of the Beholder

2012-01-05T06:21:00.000-08:00

What gives a violin made by Stradivari or Guarneri del Gesù its remarkable sound? Researchers have examined the wood preservatives, varnish, even the effects of the Little Ice Age on the density of wood, for anything that might explain the instruments’ almost magical properties. Claudia Fritz, an expert on the acoustics of violins at the University of Paris, has arrived at a different explanation for the secret. Despite a widespread belief in the old violins’ superiority and the millions of dollars it now costs to buy a Stradivarius, the fiddles made by the old masters do not in fact sound better than high-quality modern instruments, according to a blindfolded play-off she and colleagues have conducted. more

More Traffic Equals Higher Toll for Seattle Residents

2012-01-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

Today the Seattle region begins a massive experiment in behavioral psychology and regional transportation. Following the holiday week, it’s the first real commute since the start of tolling on the State Route 520 bridge — a key artery connecting Seattle to the Eastside homes of many of the region’s biggest tech companies. The variable toll is as much as $3.50 one way with an electronic pass during peak hours, which is no small expense for everyday commuters. more

Training at Irregular Intervals Improves Learning in Sea Snails

2012-01-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

Sea snails learn more effectively on an oddly timed series of training sessions rather than regularly spaced lessons, a new study finds. If the results extend to humans, they might suggest ways of improving students’ study habits...When the rat-sized Aplysia californica receives an unpleasant shock, it retracts its gill and an appendage called a siphon. After numerous shocks, it will become sensitized, learning to retract the siphon and keep it in for a while. Scientists normally expose sea snails to the signal at regular intervals over several hours to sensitize the animals. But Jack Byrne of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and colleagues wondered whether there was a better way. “There’s no real logic for why people use one protocol over another, other than it works,” he says. more

What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits

2012-01-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

It's a tradition as old as New Year's: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of M &Ms that our co-worker has helpfully positioned on the aisle corner of his desk. There will be exercise, and the learning of a new language. It is resolved. So what does science know about translating our resolve into actual changes in behavior? The answer to this question brings us — strangely enough — to a story about heroin use in Vietnam...To explain why, you need to understand how the science of behavior change has itself changed. more

Toddlers Don't Monitor Their Own Speech

2011-12-30T07:39:00.000-08:00

Adults and children hear their own voice and use it as feedback to monitor their speech, but it seems that young toddlers do not. When I’m talking I can hear my own voice. And with that feedback I can tell almost immediately when I’ve made an error. Like I just did. An error. Adults have this skill and so do older children. But we are not born with this ability. It develops between ages two and four. So finds a study in the journal Current Biology. more

Behavioral Safety via SmartPhone

2011-12-29T07:00:00.001-08:00

An extra eye on the road: It's rare that an Android app exclusive could make iPhone users jealous, but the iOnRoad augmented driving safety app is one of them. Mount an Android smartphone running the app on to the windshield and it uses the phone's camera to provide an extra eye on the road. It monitors traffic, measuring relative speeds between your car and the car in front, reporting all information onscreen. It also provides an advanced collision warning system, monitoring if the car ahead is perilously close. It also features a launch screen for other apps, making the phone easier to control in-commute. The app even dips a toe in the world of behaviour modification, issuing "safety points" to drivers operating at safe speeds and at safe headway distance from the car ahead. more

Schools Encourage Healthier Eating with "Nudges"

2011-12-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

[H]ealth experts say using "behavioral economics" to influence student purchasing is a less drastic way to combat childhood obesity and encourage healthier eating. The idea behind this mix of economics and psychology is that subconscious signals affect decisions to eat healthier. Simple tweaks to the lunch line can shift perceptions, steering students toward healthier choices while still allowing choice...Research has found that placing healthier items in the front of the lunch line, promoting food with descriptive names and letting students choose among good-for-you options all have significant impacts. Putting fruit in attractive baskets instead of stainless steel bins or charging less for healthier items has been found to influence student choices. more

UCLA Neuroscientists Demonstrate Advances in "Brain Reading"

2011-12-28T06:30:00.000-08:00

For the study, smokers sometimes watched videos meant to induce cravings, sometimes watched "neutral" videos and at sometimes watched no video at all. They were instructed to attempt to fight nicotine cravings when they arose. The data from fMRI scans taken of the study participants was then analyzed. Traditional machine learning methods were augmented by Markov processes, which use past history to predict future states. By measuring the brain networks active over time during the scans, the resulting machine learning algorithms were able to anticipate changes in subjects' underlying neurocognitive structure, predicting with a high degree of accuracy (90 percent for some of the models tested) what they were watching and, as far as cravings were concerned, how they were reacting to what they viewed. more

How Smart Is This Bird? Let It Count the Ways

2011-12-27T05:50:00.000-08:00

By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame. Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest. more

Heroes Of The Taj Hotel: Why They Risked Their Lives

2011-12-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

When a Mumbai hotel was besieged by terrorists in 2008, something extraordinary happened: Workers didn't flee. They stayed behind to help save guests at the risk of their own lives. What could possibly explain it? A new study attempts to answer that question..."It perhaps has something to do with the kinds of people that they recruit to become employees at the Taj, and then the manner that they train them and reward them," he says...This system — of immediately rewarding desired behavior — will likely sound familiar to people interested in psychology. It's by-the-book conditioning, the same kind of conditioning used by B.F. Skinner to train his pigeons. more

Mothers' Teach Their Children "Perspective Taking"

2011-12-23T07:21:00.000-08:00

Young children whose mothers talk with them more frequently and in more detail about people's thoughts and feelings tend to be better at taking another's perspective than other children of the same age. That's what researchers from the University of Western Australia found in a new longitudinal study published in the journal Child Development. "Parents who frequently put themselves in someone else's shoes in conversations with their children make it more likely that their children will be able to do the same," according to Brad Farrant, postdoctoral fellow at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia, the study's lead author. more

Spirit's Ben Baldanza compared to B.F. Skinner

2011-12-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

In an interview, Baldanza told IdeaWorks: "The fees we charge do two things. They are not only there to drive revenue. Another absolutely strategically important aspect is to create economic incentives for customers to behave in ways that lower our costs," the report states. That's the basic behavior modification principal IdeaWorks talks about. If you bring aboard a bag for the overhead compartment, you have to pay extra. If you don't pay for it when you book the ticket, you pay even more. more

Habit Formation is Enabled by Gateway to Brain Cells

2011-12-22T06:54:00.000-08:00

Research published in the journal Neuron shows that NMDA receptors on dopamine neurons in the brain's basal ganglia are essential to habit formation. These receptors function like gateways to the brain cells, letting in electrically charged ions to increase the activity and communication of neurons. Their pivotal role reminds neuroscientist Dr. Lei Phillip Wang of a computer's central processing unit. "The NMDA receptor is a commander, which is why it's called a master switch for brain cell connectivity," said Wang, the study's first author. To determine their role in habit formation, GHSU researchers used a genetic trick to selectively disable the NMDA receptors on dopamine neurons and found, for example, mice could be trained to push a lever for food without it becoming an automatic response. If they were full, they wouldn't push the lever. But just as humans can't refrain from flipping a light switch during a power outage, satiated mice with receptors could not pass up the lever. more

"The Experimental Analysis of Behavior" Reprinted in Latest Issue of American Scientist

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

B. F. Skinner's 1957 article "The Experimental Analysis of Behavior" is reproduced in full in the latest issue of American Scientist. It is available for free online. From the article:

"Not so long ago the expression “a science of behavior” would have been regarded as a contradiction in terms. Living organisms were distinguished by the fact that they were spontaneous and unpredictable. If you saw something move without being obviously pushed or pulled, you could be pretty sure it was alive. This was so much the case that mechanical imitations of living things—singing birds which flapped their wings, figures on a clock tolling a bell—had an awful fascination which, in the age of electronic brains and automation, we cannot recapture or fully understand. One hundred and fifty years of science and invention have robbed living creatures of this high distinction." more

Latest Issue of "Inside Behavior Analysis" Available Online

2011-12-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of Inside Behavior Analysis, the official newsletter of the Association for Behavior Analysis, International, is now available. This issue includes an article by SABA president Michael Dougher discussing the important work SABA does on behalf of behavior analysis; a recap of the 2011 Autism Conference in Washington, DC; updates from ABAI boards, committees, and accredited programs; Abigail Calkin’s touching tribute to Steve Graf; and more.

New Strain of Lab Mice Seem to Mimic Human Alcohol Consumption Patterns

2011-12-20T07:32:00.000-08:00

A line of laboratory mice developed by a researcher from the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) drinks more alcohol than other animal models and consumes it in a fashion similar to humans: choosing alcohol over other options and binge drinking..."The free-choice drinking demonstrated by the new mouse line provides a unique opportunity to study the excessive intake that often occurs in alcohol-dependent individuals and to explore the predisposing factors for excessive consumption, as well as the development of physiological, behavioral and toxicological outcomes following alcohol exposure," says Grahame, who is a biopsychologist specializing in alcoholism. more

Take This Sugar Pill and Call Me in the Morning

2011-12-19T06:26:00.000-08:00

"People behave according to context and circumstances. This is true with regard to medical or pharmaceutical treatment," explains Dr. Ofer Caspi, Director of the Integrative Medicine Section at the Rabin Medical Center, Beilinson Hospital. "People respond to the name of the medicine, its color, size and cost. The way medicine is taken has a big impact. Having a shot is more effective than taking a pill. A red shot is more effective than a colorless one; and an operation is considered the most effective treatment..." Prof. Rafael Gorodischer of the Patient Safety and Risk Management Unit at the Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva, believes that "the expectation of success in treatment and the patient's motivation are related to effects of placebos. Another factor is classical 'Pavlovian' conditioning, as a result of a learning process." more

Police Reward Good Drivers With Gift Cards

2011-12-19T06:23:00.000-08:00

Drivers received some positive reinforcement for obeying the rules of the road during the holidays. Police officers in Prosper, TX, gave out gift cards as a reward for good driving. Gary McHone, Prosper's Assistant Police Chief, said this is their way to live up to a well-known police motto of "to protect and serve." more

Erroneous Analyses of Interactions in Neuroscience: A Problem of Significance

2011-12-16T06:45:00.000-08:00

In theory, a comparison of two experimental effects requires a statistical test on their difference. In practice, this comparison is often based on an incorrect procedure involving two separate tests in which researchers conclude that effects differ when one effect is significant (P < 0.05) but the other is not (P > 0.05). We reviewed 513 behavioral, systems and cognitive neuroscience articles in five top-ranking journals (Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and The Journal of Neuroscience) and found that 78 used the correct procedure and 79 used the incorrect procedure. An additional analysis suggests that incorrect analyses of interactions are even more common in cellular and molecular neuroscience. We discuss scenarios in which the erroneous procedure is particularly beguiling. more

"Behaviorism at 100" - Revisionist History?

2011-12-15T05:56:00.000-08:00

From Scientific American: According to author Stephen Ledoux, "Over its second 50 years, the study of behavior evolved to become a discipline, behaviorology, independent of psychology." Behaviorism as a philosophy of science began with an article by John B. Watson in 1913, and its several varieties inform different behavior-related disciplines. During the past 100 years, disciplinary developments have led to a clarified version of behaviorism informing a basic, separate natural science of behavior. This recently emerged independent discipline not only complements other natural sciences, but also shares in solving local and global problems by showing how to discover and effectively control the variables that unlock solutions to the common behavior-related components of these problems. more

Helping Your Fellow Rat: Rodents Seem to Show Empathic Behavior

2011-12-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

The first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents has been observed in laboratory rats that repeatedly free companions from a restraint, according to a new study by University of Chicago neuroscientists ..."There was no other reason to take this action, except to terminate the distress of the trapped rats," Bartal said. "In the rat model world, seeing the same behavior repeated over and over basically means that this action is rewarding to the rat." As a test of the power of this reward, another experiment was designed to give the free rats a choice: free their companion or feast on chocolate. Two restrainers were placed in the cage with the rat, one containing the cagemate, another containing a pile of chocolate chips. Though the free rat had the option of eating all the chocolate before freeing its companion, the rat was equally likely to open the restrainer containing the cagemate before opening the chocolate container. more

Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing

2011-12-13T05:50:00.000-08:00

Several biologically inspired paths are being explored by computer scientists in universities and corporate laboratories worldwide. But researchers from I.B.M. and four universities — Cornell, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Merced — are engaged in a project that seems particularly intriguing...In recent months, the team has developed prototype “neurosynaptic” microprocessors, or chips that operate more like neurons and synapses than like conventional semiconductors...It is still questionable whether the scientists can successfully assemble large clusters of neuromorphic chips. And though the intention is for the machines to evolve more from learning than from being programmed, the software that performs that magic for any kind of complex task has yet to be written. more

Survival of the Fittest: Linguistic Evolution In Practice

2011-12-12T05:40:00.000-08:00

A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which “sound better” to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created, suggesting that, like biological organisms, words are subject to selection pressures that play a role in deciding which words become part of a language over time. [With link to original article] more

The Chimpanzee Who "Sees" Sounds?

2011-12-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

To determine whether humans learn to associate sounds and colours from others, or whether they are innate and do not require language, Ludwig searched for the associations in captive chimpanzees. She and colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan showed six chimps aged 8 to 32 a small black or white box, and then trained them to to select a square of the same colour on a screen to receive a fruit reward. The apes also heard a high or low tone when making their choice. When high tones accompanied white squares and low tones were matched with black, the animals picked the correct colour 93% of the time, on average. When the colours and sounds were reversed, their success rate fell to about 90%. more

Good Or Bad: Surprises Drive Learning In Same Neural Circuits

2011-12-08T05:34:00.000-08:00

Primates learn from feedback that surprises them, and in a recent investigation of how that happens, neurosurgeons have learned something new...Some scientists have posited that separate anatomical structures, or at least distinct circuits, process positive or negative feedback to direct future behavior, but there has been little proof, at least at the level of individual neurons. Asaad said he expected to find some of those hypothesized processing differences between the lateral prefrontal cortex and the subcortical caudate nucleus, which govern high-level planning, by probing hundreds of individual neurons in each structure in two macaque monkeys while they worked on trial-and-error learning tasks. Monkeys received juice for guessing right or none for being wrong. Instead, he and Eskandar found the neurons in both structures acted very similarly for both positive and for negative feedback. "We were looking for differences and we just didn't detect any in the signals we were looking for," said Asaad, who is affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science. more

The Paper Wasp Has a Special Talent for Learning Faces

2011-12-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

Sheehan and Tibbetts tested learning by training wasps to discriminate between two different images mounted inside a T-maze, with one image displayed at each end of the top arm of the T. Twelve wasps were trained for 40 consecutive trials on each image type. The paired images included photos of normal paper wasp faces, photos of caterpillars, simple geometric patterns, and computer-altered wasp faces. A reward was consistently associated with one image in a pair. more

Gray Matter in Brain’s "Control Center" Linked to Reward Processing

2011-12-06T05:35:00.000-08:00

Within a short period of the MRI scans, the scientists also used electrodes placed on the research subjects’ scalps to measure a particular electrical signal known as the P300 (an event-related potential derived from an ongoing electroencephalogram, or EEG, that is time-locked to a particular event). This specific measure can index brain activity related to reward processing. During these electrical recordings, the subjects performed a timed psychological task (pressing buttons according to a specific set of rules) with the prospect of earning varying levels of monetary reward, from no money up to 45 cents for each correct response with a total potential reward of $50. Previous studies by the research team have shown that, in healthy subjects, the P300 signal increases in magnitude with the amount of monetary reward offered. Cocaine-addicted individuals, however, do not exhibit this differential response in the P300 measure of brain activity, even though they, like the healthy subjects, rate the task as more interesting and exciting when the potential reward is greater. more

Basic Behavioral Principles And Immigration Reform

2011-12-05T05:35:00.000-08:00

Behaviorist principles can inform the issue of immigration. By definition, all reinforced behaviors will continue or increase in frequency or intensity. Surely, illegal immigration makes up a set of behaviors that have been reinforced for decades. Illegal immigrants are directly rewarded by powerful financial incentives, including employment opportunities and an array of entitlements. Indirectly, they are reinforced by the weak Executive Branch follow-through on immigration laws. These are the “magnets” to which several Republican candidates have often referred. Understanding this, who can blame immigrants who enter our country illegally? more

Chimps, Feces-Throwing, And Operant Conditioning

2011-12-02T06:15:00.000-08:00

"What appears to be the main reward for throwing [feces] is the simple ability to control or manipulate the behaviour of the targeted individual (ape or human). For example, in our laboratory, chimpanzees will patiently wait for strangers or visitors to approach and then will throw at them. They do not conceal their intentions and they will often stand bipedal and threaten to throw by cocking their arm with the projectile in their hand in preparation for throwing. The passers-by can see this and will often try and negotiate with the chimpanzees to put down the projectile, or they will try to trick the ape by stopping, then dashing rapidly past the ape enclosure. This seems to be the reaction the apes hope to get from the humans and, in operant conditioning terms, is the only 'reward' the chimpanzees receive for throwing." more

Say Goodbye To Being Shy

2011-12-02T06:12:00.000-08:00

"Shyness is characterised by being nervous and having anxiety when around other people. There may be some physiological responses, such as sweaty palms and feelings of panic, when the shy person has to talk to others," explains Dr Jon Bailey, professor of psychology at Florida State University and specialist in behaviour analysis...A number of techniques are being used by therapists to help their clients through shyness, and include repeatedly exposing the client to feared social situations (for example, practising public speaking); challenging the unrealistic beliefs and predictions that contribute to the anxiety (for example, examining the evidence for anxiety-provoking beliefs rather than assuming they are true); and learning to improve social and communication skills. "Collectively, these strategies are taught in the form of psychotherapy called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)," he explains." more

Psychology Must Learn A Lesson From Fraud Case

2011-12-01T05:41:00.000-08:00

In a 2006 study published in American Psychologist, I helped to show that almost three-quarters of researchers who had published a paper in a high-impact psychology journal had not shared their data (J. M. Wicherts et al. Am. Psychol. 61, 726–728; 2006). Several data sets, authors said, had been misplaced, whereas others were kept secret because they were part of ongoing work, or because of ethical rules meant to protect participants' privacy. Such confidentiality has long been the most common excuse that psychologists offer for not sharing data, but in practice, most simply fail to document their data in a way that allows others to quickly and easily check their work. more

No Child Left Behind, Or Else

2011-11-30T05:54:00.000-08:00

Demanding better performance from schools and teachers is a good start, but part of the answer to America’s mediocre educational performance lies in asking more of students...Schools can also motivate students with positive reinforcement by paying them for performance. In a 2010 study that used randomized trials in over 250 urban schools, Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that financial incentives for educational inputs (e.g. paying students to read books) can significantly increase achievement. In fact, relative to education reforms of the past few decades, financial incentives “produce similar gains in achievement at lower costs.” more

Behind The ABCs In Vietnam

2011-11-29T05:51:00.000-08:00

Learning Strategies is Vietnam’s first organization to provide children experiencing behavioral, developmental or academic difficulties with specialized support. The group’s director Tony Louw explains their origins and aims to Madeleine Adamson...Louw advocates the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), a teaching strategy that uses a child’s interests to accelerate their rate of learning. “ABA is a scientifically validated mode of intervention in which goals are broken down into achievable developmental steps,” says Louw. more

Nature Neuroscience: Leptin Regulates The Reward Value Of Nutrient

2011-11-29T05:48:00.000-08:00

We developed an assay for quantifying the reward value of nutrient and used it to analyze the effects of metabolic state and leptin. In this assay, mice chose between two sippers, one of which dispensed water and was coupled to optogenetic activation of dopaminergic (DA) neurons and the other of which dispensed natural or artificial sweeteners. This assay measured the reward value of sweeteners relative to lick-induced optogenetic activation of DA neurons. Mice preferred optogenetic stimulation of DA neurons to sucralose, but not to sucrose. However, the mice preferred sucralose plus optogenetic stimulation versus sucrose. We found that food restriction increased the value of sucrose relative to sucralose plus optogenetic stimulation, and that leptin decreased it. Our data suggest that leptin suppresses the ability of sucrose to drive taste-independent DA neuronal activation and provide new insights into the mechanism of leptin's effects on food intake. more

The A-B-C's of Parenting

2011-11-28T05:44:00.000-08:00

Your kid's having another meltdown. What are you going to do? New research says time-outs or other punishments won't make the bad behavior stop in the long run. Neither will nagging, endless explaining, or yelling. To really get them to change, parents have to focus on the "A-B-C's," says Dr. Alan Kazdin, a Yale psychology professor who also heads the Yale Parenting Center. His team of researchers have developed techniques they describe as a parent management training program, focusing on the ABC's. more

Teaching Patients To Ease Their Own Pain

2011-11-28T05:40:00.000-08:00

Already, neuroscientists know that how people perceive pain is highly individual, involving heredity, stress, anxiety, fear, depression, previous experience and general health. Motivation also plays a huge role—and helps explain why a gravely wounded soldier can ignore his own pain to save his buddies while someone who is depressed may feel incapacitated by a minor sprain. more

Should We Pay People To Be Healthy?

2011-11-25T07:08:00.000-08:00

A provocative new study out of Australia investigates the novel approach of providing financial incentives to individuals if they change their health behavior. Investigators note that financial incentives transform many business behaviors, including the way physicians practice. For that reason, Dr. Marita Lynagh and her colleagues from the University of Newcastle in Australia set out to investigate if financial incentives could encourage individuals to change unhealthy behaviors and use preventive health services. more

Darwin’s Tongues

2011-11-23T06:18:00.000-08:00

Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data. These data analyzers assume that words and other language units change systematically as they are passed from one generation to the next, much the way genes do. Charles Darwin similarly argued in 1871 that languages, like biological species, have evolved into a series of related forms. And in the same way that geneticists use computerized statistical approaches to put together humankind’s family tree from the DNA of living people and a few long-dead individuals, these newcomers can generate family trees, called phylogenies, for languages. From existing data on numbers of speech sounds and types of grammatical structure, these phylogenies can point to ancient root languages and trace a path to today’s tongues. more

Does So-Called "Language Gene" Speed Learning?

2011-11-23T06:15:00.000-08:00

At the neuroscience meeting, Schreiweis reported that mice with the human form of FOXP2 learn more quickly than ordinary mice. She challenged mice to solve a maze that involved turning either left or right to find a water reward. A visual clue, such as a star, along with the texture of the maze's surface, showed the correct direction to turn. After eight days of practice, mice with the human form of FOXP2 learnt to follow the clues to the water 70% of the time. Normal mice took an additional four days to reach this level. Schreiweis says that the human form of the gene allowed mice to more quickly integrate the visual and tactile clues when learning to solve the maze. In humans, she says, the mutation to FOXP2 might have helped our species learn the complex muscle movements needed to form basic sounds and then combine these sounds into words and sentences. more

Unpredictable Rewards: Twitter's "Activity" Stream And Our Dwindling Attention Reservoir

2011-11-22T05:30:00.000-08:00

It might seem like splitting hairs to term one use of Twitter distracting, as if other forms were obviously productive and always informative. But Twitter--and Facebook, and Google+--give back what you put into them. And whether you find the recurring distractions of social networks helpful at all depends on what your goal is. Eyal Ophir, primary researcher at the Stanford Multitasking study, believes ticker-style updates are effective in a way familiar to researchers of operant conditioning. "Unpredictable rewards keep us guessing, so we'll keep checking long after we're no longer getting rewarded, because 'you never know,'" Ophir wrote in an email. "So if there's one or two exciting tweets, or a rewarding social experience in the Facebook Ticker, and we can never tell when something like that will come again, that's going to be a good motivator for us to just keep checking. And that's going to drive up the perceived value of interrupting whatever we're doing (work, family, etc.) to go and check." more

The Musical Ability of Goldfish

2011-11-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

After the death of a pet Papillion dog she had trained to participate in a Punch and Judy puppet show, she wasn’t emotionally ready to train another dog, and decided to see what she could do with goldfish. The plan was to include a video of the fish performing in a shadow puppet show. “I didn’t expect much from them other than to be able to train kind of rote behaviors,” Rains said. But Jor Jor caught on quickly when she trained her to ring a hand bell by pulling at a line extended into the water. “She took to it with such obvious zeal that I thought, you know, I need to pursue this more, because clearly this fish loves music,” Rains said. Rains uses operant conditioning devised by the psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s as her training technique. It involves rewarding desired behavior, in little steps, with food until the entire action is completed. more

Fraud Scandal Fuels Debate Over Practices of Psychology

2011-11-18T05:36:00.000-08:00

The discovery that the Dutch researcher Diederik A. Stapel made up the data for dozens of research papers has shaken up the field of social psychology, fueling a discussion not just about outright fraud, but also about subtler ways of misusing research data. Such misuse can happen even unintentionally, as researchers try to make a splash with their peers—and a splash, maybe, with the news media, too...Even before the Stapel case broke, a flurry of articles had begun appearing this fall that pointed to supposed systemic flaws in the way psychologists handle data...Bad things happen when researchers feel under pressure, [Wagenmakers] adds—and it doesn't have to be Stapel-bad: "There's a slippery slope between making up your data and torturing your data." more

The 2012 Association for Behavior Analysis, International Autism Conference Program Is Now Online.

2011-11-18T05:35:00.000-08:00

The 2012 Association for Behavior Analysis, International (ABAI) Autism Conference program is now online. ABAI's Sixth Annual Autism Conference will be held January 27–29, 2012, in Philadelphia, PA. You can view the entire program online and use the personal scheduler to plan your time at the event. more

The End of the Maze: How The Rodent Labyrinth Fell Out Of Favor

2011-11-17T05:36:00.000-08:00

Soon the rat became the standard animal in psychology, and the maze was the standard apparatus for the rat. One crucial innovation came from a young psychologist named James B. Watson, who for his dissertation sent rodents through a Hampton Court maze while under various degrees of sensory deprivation...The golden age of maze-building would soon come to an end, however. In the 1920s, the psychologist B.F. Skinner put rats through mazes as many of his colleagues did, but by the end of the following decade his faith in the method had waned. He began testing rats and pigeons in a bare-bones, lever-pressing apparatus. As Skinner's influence grew over the next few decades, conventional maze research fell into decline. Psychologists turned their attention toward the study of reinforcement schedules and stimulus-response relationships that could be measured without having to build a double-alternating, tridimensional spiral. more

Alan Kazdin Wins the APA Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology Award

2011-11-17T05:35:00.000-08:00

Alan E. Kazdin is the 2011 winner of the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology. “For outstanding and pathbreaking contributions to the understanding of the development, assessment, and treatment of psychopathology. Alan E. Kazdin’s theoretically innovative, methodologically rigorous, and scientifically informed research has significantly advanced knowledge of child and adolescent psychopathologies such as depression and conduct problems. His writings on research strategies and methods have set a high standard for rigor in the field. His work and his ideas have had an enormous impact on the science, practice, and teaching of psychology, and his research has strengthened assessment and treatment of children and adolescents in scientific and clinical settings. His passion, energy, wisdom, and wit have inspired countless colleagues and students over the years, and his work will no doubt continue to do so for many generations to come.” more

Motion Pictures In The Human Sciences Film Archive

2011-11-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

The Motion Pictures in the Human Sciences site is an online library and discussion forum relating to the history of the use of motion pictures in psychology, psychiatry, the neurosciences, and related fields. The site is the online extension of a new collaboration between film historians and historians of science at the University of Chicago, to study the relationship between the history of the human sciences and the history of film. The online library contains a growing number of films and related material. Some of the films you can view here have never before been digitized. The site also serves a curatorial role: we have tracked down films available in disparate locations on the web, and have imbedded them here, to make them easier to find, document, and discuss. more

The Psychology of Poker Machines

2011-11-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

The core of pokie [poker machine] technology is reinforcement, utilising the principles of both operant and classical conditioning. Operant conditioning relies on the provision of random rewards to induce continued activity, on the basis that excitement is generated by the unpredictability of the size and timing of such rewards. Classical conditioning in a sense complements this by marking out the rewards with lights and sounds, which in time become associated with the provision of the reward. In other words, the pokie is a machine to program humans to particular types of behaviour. more

Dr. Jerry Shook Passes Away After A Long Battle With Cancer

2011-11-14T06:01:00.000-08:00

On Friday, November 11th, 2011 Dr. Jerry Shook, founding CEO of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board, passed away after a long struggle with cancer. Dr. Shook's contributions to public policy and credentialing in behavior analysis were monumental in shaping the field as we know it today. more

Exposing Social Gaming's Hidden Lever

2011-11-10T05:35:00.000-08:00

Zynga’s (the makers of the Facebook game Farmville) success has much to do with their skillfully executed manipulation of the human brain. One such method is known as the Random Reward Schedule, based on the results of a study conducted by psychologist B.F. Skinner. In this study, he found that giving pigeons a consistent food reward lead to the least engagement. They would eventually get bored and only come back when hungry. Skinner then found that randomizing whether the reward was given made the pigeons come back more often, as did randomizing the amount of the reward. Lastly, he found that combining these experiments to randomize both whether the reward would occur and how much the award was for lead to a striking increase in engagement. Zynga and other social games companies have implemented the Random Reward Schedule to great effect in their games to keep players coming back. more

Discipline Without Spanking

2011-11-09T05:53:00.000-08:00

Just like practicing a musical instrument or practicing the backstroke over and over in advance of a performance or competition, teaching our children to behave properly in a variety of situations takes preparation on our part and practice, practice, practice...Unless you decide to teach that positive behavior -- good manners at the grocery store or handling delicate things with care -- your child will always return to the negative behavior, says Dr. Alan Kazdin, professor psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University, director of the Yale Parenting Center and author of The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. more

Tantrum Tamer: New (Old) Ways Parents Can Stop Bad Behavior

2011-11-08T05:43:00.000-08:00

Forget everything you may have read about coping with children's temper tantrums. Time-outs, sticker charts, television denial—for many, none of these measures will actually result in long-term behavior change, according to researchers at two academic institutions. Instead, a set of techniques known as "parent management training" is proving so helpful to families struggling with a child's unmanageable behavior that clinicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to adopt them...The training focuses on three components known as the ABCs: the Antecedent, or the environment and events that set the stage for a tantrum or other undesirable action. Then there is the Behavior itself, and how parents can help a child learn new behaviors, in some cases using pretend scenarios. The Consequences component involves reinforcing a positive behavior or discouraging a negative one. more

Odds Are, It's Wrong

2011-11-07T06:05:00.001-08:00

For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings. During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot. more